No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  Pulling open the door to the refrigerator, he saw a massive turkey, leftovers from Thanksgiving. It was July, and the picked-over bones had inches of thick mold on them. Ford was sure they had spores that hadn’t been discovered yet.

  “Clean the fridge,” he barked.

  But the team blew him off. Nobody owned up to bringing in the turkey.

  “You all own the fridge,” Ford said. “One, you need to be able to put your lunch in there because you’re not going home every day for lunch. You’re going to be training. Two, I want that thing full of beer.”

  Beer in the refrigerator was technically forbidden. They had all been given counseling statements saying they couldn’t keep beer in the team room. So Ford rummaged through all of their folders and tossed all of the statements in the trash.

  “I said put beer in there. If I tell you to do something that is illegal, I am accepting the responsibility for it. If you get called out on it, I am going to take that heat round personally,” he told them.

  Beer was currency in the Special Forces. And Ford used it to help make his points. If you say you’re doing something for the first time, that was a case of beer. If you made a mistake, that was a case of beer. At the end of most training shoots on the range, there was a “beer shoot.” Each soldier saved a magazine and the worst shot, well, that was a case of beer.

  The team had been accruing beer debt, so when the refrigerator was finally clean, Ford told the soldiers who owed beer to stock the fridge before they went home. They came back with twelve-packs. Ford was shocked.

  “Did I say you owe half a case or a case? I don’t do half cases. It is either a full case or none,” Ford said.

  So Ford broke out the marker and drew a box with twenty-four circles on it.

  “Now you have a pictorial view of what a case of beer looks like,” he said. “If you have any questions, come back to this dry-erase board to make sure you know if you have a case or not.”

  It was hard for Ford at first. He had come from a team of senior sergeants who knew their job and had been doing it for ten years. On his new team, the most senior guy was Karl Wurzbach. Some of the men had never been in the Army until they joined Special Forces. Ford would often explode because they didn’t know their job. But he soon realized that it wasn’t all their fault. They just hadn’t been given the right guidance.

  One time, two soldiers didn’t show for PT. They stayed home and put their kids on the school bus. Ford understood it—but they hadn’t asked him first. The soldiers said they had cleared it with Walton. In Ford’s view, he was the only one who could excuse a soldier from physical training. That was how he ran his team. Old-school. But he knew what the guys were doing. They were playing the “mom and pop” game. If Ford said no, they would go to Walton. That had been going on a lot—and it had to end. Walton was an officer—and was responsible for planning missions. Ford’s job was to whip the team into shape—mold them into a cohesive unit that could tackle any assignment. And physical training was an important part of that process. He knew the mountains in Afghanistan were no joke.

  Ford’s relationship with Walton also was a work in progress. They were both type A personalities who wanted to do things their way. Walton was used to being a platoon leader and wanted to micromanage the daily activities. But in Ford’s view, that was the team sergeant’s duty. It made sense. Most team sergeants were rolling with a decade’s worth of experience in Special Forces, while many team leaders rotated in and out of units quickly, and some, like Walton, were brand-new to the job.

  So that day, Ford decided to talk to Walton to close that fissure.

  “Listen, you stay out of their business,” Ford told Walton. “I am going to change it. I am going to fix it. That is what I do. It is my job to keep you out of our business. If you have an issue, you can come to me..”

  So, while the team showered up after PT, Ford took out a marker again and began drawing on the dry-erase board. He started by sketching a stick figure for each team member. Then he drew a stick figure above everybody. That was him. Lightning bolts led to him, and over his figure he wrote in block letters: THE MAN. When the guys arrived in the team room, the message was clear.

  “The only guy that relieves anybody from PT, or any other training on this team, is me,” he told them.

  Some of the soldiers weren’t used to it. He heard their complaints. Their wives were upset that they weren’t home. Two guys even had the balls to approach Ford to gripe about it. He detonated on them.

  “I give a shit what your wife thinks? The reality is you guys sat here and didn’t do anything for seven months,” he said. “You got paid for the extra seven months you didn’t do anything and now you’re paying for it.”

  Plus, he knew that if something happened to his men, he wouldn’t be able to look at their wives and families knowing that he hadn’t done everything he could to prepare them for the mission.

  Ford had already been to Iraq and Afghanistan. He knew what combat was like and knew this team just wasn’t ready. Not yet. They had a lot of work to do, especially after the team’s previous deployment, in which they didn’t conduct a lot of missions. Ford was set on making sure the team had the skills to survive because he didn’t plan on sitting on his ass in some firebase. They were going after the bad guys.

  Soon after taking over the team, he sat down with Walton and came up with the tasks they needed to accomplish. The training ranged from shooting to land navigation to just driving trucks at night.

  Thinking back to their premission training in Savannah, Georgia, he recalled one of the first live fire drills. It was a convoy exercise. That’s where a team driving trucks is attacked. He wanted to see how his team would react.

  “Upon contact,” Ford told the guys huddled around his truck, “everybody is going to shoot. I want a high volume of fire. If you can shoot in the direction of the contact, you will have a gun out and it will be shooting until I tell you to stop.”

  Ford explained that after the initial burst there was nothing but confusion.

  “Your truck might be the only one left alive,” he said.

  Gaining fire superiority was essential. A few minutes later, the team started down the path in their trucks. One of the instructors placed a smoke grenade on the lead truck, signifying that it had been hit. Then a machine gun fired a few blanks. But his team only responded with a short burst and then silence. Guys with their rifles were just sitting there. Then another gun opened up after a minute.

  Pathetic, Ford thought.

  He had given the team basic instructions. Everybody shoot.

  Jumping out of his truck, he stopped the convoy. His rage was practically palpable. Grabbing his helmet, he threw it onto the road. It hit and skidded onto the shoulder.

  “Get the fuck out,” Ford yelled. “Get out.”

  The team climbed out of the trucks and gathered up.

  “We are going to redo this exercise if it takes us the next three days until you get it right,” Ford shouted at them. “We were going to train to standard and not to time. We can either get this done in a matter of six hours or twenty-four hours.”

  Ford had to very quickly teach them how to operate as a team. He didn’t want to come down too hard, but that’s what happened. He didn’t want to see guys trying to learn it in Afghanistan. He owned them from Tuesday through Thursday. They would go to the range, driving in convoy formation, and they would stay out past sundown reacting to ambushes all night. That was when the team really bought into his leadership style. At first they thought that he was a prick.

  But after premission training, things clicked. The team understood what Ford was doing and their hard work paid off. The team’s old mentality was buried.

  When Ford was growing up in Special Forces, if you screwed up, you found your rucksack in the hallway. It sent a simple message: Find another team. Ford told them if he heard them talk about the last deployment, he was going to throw their rucksacks out of the team room. That’s be
cause during the last trip they’d done nothing. This trip, they were going to do something.

  A few weeks before the team left for Afghanistan, Ford discovered that his team was getting the battalion’s most important mission. The battalion’s operations officer had gone to Selection with Ford and respected him. He knew Ford was a badass team sergeant who could get the job done.

  “You’re going to mentor these commandos,” the officer told him at Fort Bragg.

  Ford was excited. “We can run with it,” he said.

  His team was going to build Afghanistan’s first special operations force from the ground up. But he knew it came with a risk. The commandos were the Afghan Ministry of Defense’s “shiny new toy,” and Ford knew that training them would involve a lot of politics. He expected Afghan officials to showcase the unit, and use them as a symbol of the country’s new military prowess. But if his team broke that toy—if the training went poorly or if they were attacked and many commandos were killed in combat—his team would be the embarrassment of the regiment. We have to execute this well, he thought.

  The officer tried to ease Ford’s fears. “With what you did in Iraq, this should be a piece of cake,” he said.

  But Ford knew it wasn’t going to be easy. His team was young and still subscribed to the idea that Special Forces was like a SWAT Team, rescuing hostages and killing terrorists. Yeah, that’s part of the mission, Ford thought. But training host-nation soldiers was the real work. He had done it in the Caribbean before 9/11. He had trained Iraqis after the attacks. Now he would be back in Afghanistan doing the same thing.

  Back in the team room, he gave the team the good news. They had earned it. In a short few months, they had transformed themselves into the best team in the company and probably the battalion. But this mission was going to be hard. Few of the guys had trained foreign soldiers before. They’d been taught how to do it, but lacked experience. Ford knew it would require a lot of hands-on work.

  Walton ordered the team a bunch of manuals and each soldier received a copy of 7-8, the Army’s basic infantry skills guide.

  “As long as you and the commandos can operate under this book, then we’re going to be fine. Nothing sexy,” Ford said. “I don’t want them to think about sexy. Basic 7-8. Because if you can’t master that, we can’t go on to any-thing sexy.”

  But most of all, he stressed that the team had to buy into the commandos and their mission, or the whole thing would fail.

  Right before they deployed, Staff Sergeant John Wayne Walding and Staff Sergeant Matt Williams showed up right out of the qualification course. Ford would have to get them up to speed in-country because within two weeks, they would be on a plane going to Afghanistan.

  Wheels up, baby. Here we go, Ford thought.

  When the team landed in Afghanistan, Ford pushed them hard the first few months. His team killed themselves getting the commandos ready for operations. The chain of command on both the Afghan and U.S. side kept pressing to get the new unit onto the battlefield, but Ford and Walton pushed back. The Afghan commandos weren’t ready yet. The team was already working eighteen-hour days training them.

  Eat. Sleep. Train on infantry tactics.

  Ford knew he had to keep morale up. So when he discovered that team members had been stalking and smashing each other with three-foot fluorescent-tube lightbulbs, he let it go. But Ford added his own twist, of course.

  No one was injured except for a little cut on the hand from the glass. Ford didn’t want to take the fun away from the guys, even though it was a bit unsafe. It was a way to relieve stress. Plus, he viewed it as training.

  So, one day, Ford sat down and created rules and a name for the game: Punisher Sword, named after Marvel comics most famous vigilante. And in typical Ford style, he put together a PowerPoint presentation. After one team meeting, Ford walked the team through the rules of engagement.

  “I can put out any rule. I could tell you not to do it and I know it is going to happen. So rather than make a bullshit rule I can’t enforce, I will make a rule we can respect and live by it,” he told the team.

  The rules were simple. All attacks had to take place in the team house and the mess had to be cleaned up afterward. Nothing below the belt. Nothing above the breast line and each ambush had to be recorded. If it wasn’t videotaped or the “sword” didn’t break, the victim got to take the bulb from the attacker and, in front of the team, smash back. After each team meeting, Ford would ask if there were any “Punisher Sword” violations.

  Soon the team house became a war zone. Typically, it would involve five or six guys. It got to the point that when a guy called someone over to talk, the other guy would walk the other way. The soldiers began setting up ambushes around corners. Guys would come into the house, even coming from the shower, and surreptitiously find their way down the hall and back to their rooms. It was a game, but it also meant that the unit was using skills they would need to enter houses in a combat situation, clearing the corners and doing it better than they’d have been able to do if Ford had taught them on a range.

  Because now it meant a blow to the ego and the curse of a video showing you getting beaten down with a lightbulb.

  5

  Staff Sergeant John Wayne Walding

  Wandering out of the barracks wearing just his uniform and a pair of flip-flops, Staff Sergeant John Wayne Walding glanced at the sky. It was overcast again and felt like rain. No mission today, he thought. It was going to get pushed back again. He just knew it.

  So Walding headed back to the tiny room he shared with Morales and Wurzbach. It was empty and Walding began to get ready. The three had been sharing the closet-size room with two sets of bunk beds since they arrived at Jalalabad. The room was so tight that Walding could sit on the edge of his bed, extend his arm, and touch the wall on the other side.

  The tight quarters made it feel like they were teenagers having a sleepover. Sometimes, they would stay up most of the night bullshitting, talking about family, friends, and their lives. Walding was the new guy. This was Morales’s and Wurzbach’s second tour with ODA 3336. But this was Walding’s first deployment with Special Forces—and he fit right in.

  He was young and tough and smart. With his high cheekbones, soft but rugged features, soft blue eyes, wavy black hair, and lean runner’s body, he looked like a young Brad Pitt. He had an innocent, boy-next-door look. But when he flashed his infectious wide smile and gritted his white teeth, you could tell he had a playful mischievous side. He was charismatic and handsome enough to be a movie star, or a regular on a television show. But Walding had no interest in acting. He just wanted to do his job, and do it right.

  Before heading to the flight lines, Walding began inspecting his gear. He had an M4 carbine, pistol, combat load of magazines in pouches on his body armor, and a tourniquet. He had a survival kit, a knife, and an assault pack with food, water, socks, night vision, and batteries. Ford had pressed them to carry batteries. Just in case. Walding had thought briefly about bringing some music—his iPod—but didn’t want it to get damaged.

  Before every mission Walding would pump himself up by listening to some heavy metal. It wasn’t unusual for him to back an SUV up to the flight line about 150 feet from the helicopters and crank up one of his favorite songs—“Die Motherfucker Die” by the group Dope. It would get him ready for the mission:

  With helicopter rotors spinning and the flight crew running through their checks, Walding’s head would bounce up and down to the pounding rhythm and screeching guitars. At that moment he was in the zone, primed and ready to go. Songs provided background music for his tour. Sometimes when he was running hard and fast on the base, the song “Indestructible” by the group Disturbed would play on his iPod, and it would give him a boost like an extra shot of Red Bull.

  The twenty-seven-year-old would run faster and faster and pump his fist in the air. The tune would amp him up so much that he would begin thinking: Go ahead and shoot me. I’m going to get back up again. I’ve bec
ome indestructible. During his tour in Iraq, Walding had a major who loved classic rocker Bob Seger. Every time they had a night mission—when a convoy of Humvees was rolling down some remote pockmarked road—the major would pop a Seger CD into a boom-box and play “Night Moves.” It helped the major relax.

  But Walding knew there would be no night move for this mission. This operation would take place in daylight—something that worried him and other members of the team. He hoped they wouldn’t be discovered, because if they were, they would be easy targets.

  Walding just wanted to “do something bad to bad people” and come back alive. He wanted to see his wife and children. He thought about them before missions—that he was making their world a safer place. But what kind of life would they have if he was killed in action? He tried not to think about that, although those thoughts did cross his mind.

  Walding slipped into his uniform and body armor, and swapped his flip-flops for boots. He took a deep breath and headed to the helicopters. If anything, today would probably be another rehearsal. But if it were up to Walding, his team would go and “get it done.” Hunt down the insurgents.

  Walding viewed Commando Wrath as a challenge, and he never backed down from a challenge—a reason he joined the Army in the first place.

  Born on the Fourth of July in Victoria, Texas, about two hours southwest of Houston, Walding was a tough kid from the start.

  His mother and father were “hippies”—they named him after the iconic actor because his father said if he was born on July 4, he had to have a “cool name”—who were busted for selling marijuana when he was six years old. After they headed to jail, he and his older brother, Mark, went to live with their paternal grandparents in Groesbeck, Texas, about forty miles east of Waco.

  His grandfather, Sam Walding, was an oilman, a wildcatter, a disciplinarian who believed that hard work built strong character. And his grandmother, Gracia, was a southern Baptist who taught Sunday school.